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Starship Troopers–Part 3

The US president is still pushing for a new Space Force or would it be Space Marines or Starship Troopers……the big story is just how this new force, this new branch of the military be financed?

The budget battle looms large……

There are no estimates yet for what it will cost to stand up a Space Force as a separate military service. The Pentagon will request funds in next year’s budget to get the process started but Congress will want to know the full costs.

Some proponents of the Space Force have argued that if portions of the Air Force or the intelligence community are carved out to form a new service that there should be no significant added costs. But that would be a fantasy, said Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Somehow there is a misconception out there that “this is going to be absolutely resource neutral,” he said on Friday at a Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill.

The big problem is that the population does not see the need for yet another branch of the military…..

President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for a new military branch focused on space is apparently not widely shared. Two polls released today show that a majority—and in one poll, a plurality—of respondents said that the Space Force is a bad idea.

The Trump administration plans to cleave Space Force from the Air Force and have it largely in place by 2020. The first step would be to create US Space Command—a joint command within the Pentagon similar to the Joint Special Operations Command and US Cyber Command that would oversee space operations of all the services—by the end of 2018. The Pentagon will also create a Space Development Agency that will pull military space research, development, and procurement out of the Defense Department’s current acquisition system. The agency’s goal would be accelerating the development of new space stuff.